Toon Boom Harmony 12.1 Release Notes

Features

Feature

Description

Deformation

(Harmony Premium)

Create New Deformation Chain Tool

A new tool called Create New Deformation Chain lets you create new chains of deformers for new drawings by adding a Transformation-Switch node to your deformations. You can find this new tool in the Deformation toolbar.

Transformation-Switch Node

A new Transformation-Switch node lets you connect chains of deformations, Pegs, Mesh Warp, Quadmap, Quake or Ortholock nodes. The timing of drawings in a layer determines which chain is used.

Converter Script

A converter script called TB_ConvertLegacyDeformation.js changes old deformation chains into the new Harmony 12 style.

Deformation Toolbar

•

A new button called Enable Deformations lets you show deformed state of all deformed chains while drawing. It's a bit like the Set Up button in previous versions. Enabling this button shows the onion skins and other layers with images deformed or not.

•

The Reset Current Keyframe
button lets you copy the set up position as keyframe values at the current frame (like the Copy resting position to Current in Harmony 11).

•

The Transformation Selector lets you easily change the deformation chain associated with specific drawings. When using this, it changes the associated drawing in the Transformation Switch.

Convert to New Drawing and Add Deformation Chain

This feature creates a new drawing from the deformed current drawing and then associates it to a new deformation chain that has all the same deformer nodes as the original chain. It copies the values of the current keyframes and pastes them as the initial values of the new chain.

Rename Transformation

Allows you to give a more informative name to your transformation chains, either your deformation chains or any other type of chains made of peg, Mesh-warp, etc.

Web Control Center

The Web Control Center lets you perform most of the operations that the Control Center does but through a web browser. You can create, delete environments, jobs, scenes and users, as well as export from and import to the database from another site or onsite. There are movie and thumbnail previews of scenes, and you can send scenes to render.

Timeline

Remove Duplicate Key Exposure

There is a new button in the Timeline toolbar for removing unnecessary drawing key exposures that were created when pasting with the Enforce Key Exposure option selected (for example)—see Removing Duplicate Key Exposures.

Timeline

(Harmony Premium & Advanced)

Enforce Key Exposure

A new paste option lets you decide whether to create key exposures or not. This option is located in two places:

You can change the way the normal paste works. There were two presets; one for keyframes and one for exposure. Now there is a third one for pasting both keyframe and drawing exposure values at the same time. Also, you can customize the three presets to your liking.

Tip: You can also use these three presets as a quick way to change how the paste works if you don’t want to limit them to keyframes or exposures.

All three presets are available from the Timeline view menu (Edit > Modify Paste Presets)—see Modifying Paste Presets.

Extend Timing and Swap Drawings

Two new options allow you to extend the timing and swap drawings when dragging, copying, cutting or pasting in the Timeline and Xsheet views. The Fill Gap with Previous Drawing option is used at the source of the cut and the Fill to Next Key Exposure is used at the destination of the paste.

These options are located in two places:

•

Timeline view menu (Edit > Modify Paste Presets)

•

Paste Special dialog box.

Preferences

Extend Exposure of Previous Drawing

When this option is selected, drawing something in a blank frame will create a new drawing and extend the timing from the previous exposed drawing (like in older versions of Harmony).

This option is called Extend Exposure of Previous Drawing and is located in the Preferences dialog box:

Using bitmap brushes with a complex set of properties has been optimized to be two to three times faster!

Customer Experience Improvement Program

Harmony now includes the optional Customer Experience Improvement Program whereby usage information is collected and sent to Toon Boom. The data does not contain any personally identifiable information and cannot be used to identify you. The data will consist of a basic hardware description, a project summary and usage information. We will only use this information for software improvement purposes, as well as sharing the information with third parties for the same reason.

The Customer Experience Improvement Program is enabled by default but is voluntary. If you prefer not to participate, you can opt out when you first launch the software, by using a global preference, or by a command line argument.

Changes and Improvements

Changes and Improvements

Description

Deformation

(Harmony Premium)

The Deformation tool properties retain their state when you restart the application.

Web Control Center

Updated Dictionaries with Web Control Center

You must update the comp.dict file in the database so Web Control Center works properly. It is now possible for the path to be longer when sending a scene to batch render (Harmony Premium and Advanced).

Preferences

Added number of undos in preferences for Harmony Advanced and Essentials.

Nodes

Insert a node into the Node view automatically by pressing Enter while you have a node selected in the Node Library view.

Flash Import

(Harmony Premium & Advanced)

•

The Export to Harmony.zxp extension for exporting files to Harmony from Flash is now included with Harmony. You no longer need to request the extension from us. For the locations of the extension, see Importing FLA Files.

•

When importing SWF files, you can import files that have a compression of Photo (JPG) or Lossless (PNG).

What's Fixed?

Item Fixed

Description

Fixed crash

When using Colour-Override while keeping the softrender active and adjusting the Colour-Override values.

When importing a SWF file with faulty tag for JPEG image.

Fixed issues

The picker from the Colour Picker window works differently to support picking outside the application. To pick a colour, hold down the mouse button as you move along the desktop to preview colours, then release to select the colour.

If the Sticky Eye Dropper option in the Preferences dialog box (Drawing tab > Options section) is selected, the dropper will not have this new behaviour.

Parts of a drawing were not showing in OpenGL preview.

The trial version of Harmony Essentials did not see the drawings just created.

The Onion Skins of new Bones and Game Bones unintentionally change as you edit the bones.

Four-digit numbers don’t fit in the Frames, Start and Stop fields of the Playback toolbar.

The Blur-Radial-Zoom from Harmony 10.3.1.9206 gave a different result in Harmony 12.

The pencil lines of drawings do not retain their size after copy/pasting them into a new drawing layer.

Duplicating a drawing removes all the key exposures of the current drawing.

When the Onion Skin is set to Outline Only, it didn't work on drawings with deformers.

A template that includes a deformation has a thumbnail generated that does not include the bounding box of the deformed drawing. This results in the thumbnail showing only the other undeformed drawings.

The render of small pencil lines did not produce nice curves but rather angular results.

The palette-list was not saved in a new scene if you did a Save As New Version instead of Save.

Miscellaneous

Fixed export of deformation to SWF.

Fixed wrong compositing order with legacy scenes with symbols.

Fixed cel swapping from the Library view when you have symbols.

Fixed unreadable palette and scene when a colour swatch name contains a backslash (\).

Fixed wrongly displaying the internal peg controls of a drawing layer when displaying the deformation controls.

Fixed import of AI file with name of 43 characters.

Fixed texture shifts on mouse up when using the vector brush tool.

Fixed the somewhat random order of cables when dropping a parent between two children in the Timeline view.

Fixed incorrect behaviour of Toon Boom bitmap image when using the Colour-Override nodes.
They were blocked when using Render Selected Colours or Render Selected Colours and Bitmaps.